On the secularization of the image of the sovereign:
In 1789, Anna Maria Grosholtz, a native of Strasbourg and disciple of the great wax sculptor Philippe Curtius, was arrested by the Jacobins and accused of being a royal sympathizer. In fact, Grosholtz had been close to the Bourbon house and had its favor on account of the wax effigies she had made for the family. She was saved from the guillotine thanks to the intervention of Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, a revolutionary who held Curtius in great esteem. It is said that during the Reign of Terror she was employed to make the mortuary masks of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre. This type of mask, the last effigy of a person, fulfilled a similar function, although secularized, that the figures that represented the kings and emperors and replaced them during the funeral rites (1.14: perpetuating the royal dignity—the political body of the sovereign—after his death.
Luego del Terror, Marie Grosholtz se casó con François Tussaud, un ingeniero civil y en 1802 viajó a Londres por invitación de Paul Philidor, uno de los pioneros de los teatros de fantasmagoría, para exponer su colección de esculturas de cera. Madame Tussaud, como se le empezó a conocer por entonces, no pudo regresar a Francia por a las guerras napoleónicas. Luego de probar suerte en Edimburgo, organizó una exposición ambulante de efigies de cera de las celebridades y la nobleza del momento con la que recorrió el Reino Unido durante treinta y tres años. En 1835 estableció su primera colección permanente en el segundo piso del Baker Street Bazaar, que sus descendientes convertirían en el famoso museo de cera Madame Tussaud’s. La evolución de las figuras de cera de este museo, ahora poblado de celebridades del cine y la televisión, atletas, y figuras públicas como políticos y nobles, es parte importante de la estética de la secularización de la soberanía.
Tussaud’s sculptures are no longer imago in the strict sense of the term, they are mere things. Now, the difference between an image and a thing, says Owen Barfield,
lies in the fact that an image presents itself as an exterior expressing or implying an interior, whereas a thing does not. When what begins by being an image becomes in the course of time a mere thing, we are justified in describing it as an idol. And a collective state of mind, which perceives all things and no images, may thus fairly be characterized as idolatry… The world we perceive around us today is no longer a world of images, no longer therefore an exterior expressing an interior, but simply a brittle exterior surface, which is however not the surface of anything.1
Thus, our current celebrities are “idols” and our society, as foreshadowed in Oscar Wilde, idolatrous (2.12). They are also “living dead” and our society a zombie land (0.12, 0.16, 2.10, 2.13). In Madame Tussaud’s the ritual established for the funeral rites of old not only extends to living celebrities, it expands indefinitely in time as we admire these effigies-commodity.
Long die the celebrity, which cannot live because its death mask is nothing but a hollow object, a husk of sovereignty.
- Owen Barfield, History, Guilt & Habit, 47. ↩︎
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